Can businesses use social media to make downtime a thing of the past?

This month is, for people who enjoy writing to deadlines, National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. The rules are simple – from the 1st to the 30th of November, you must complete a 50,000 word novel. It sounds like a daunting task, but it’s not, really. If you write 1,667 words a day, you’re looking at 50,010 words by the end of the month.

NaNoWriMo started in 1999 in the San Francisco Bay Area with a mere 21 participants, by last year the number had risen to 165,000 of whom 30,000 managed to meet the deadline and write the required 50K words. Although originating from the US (hence National NoWriMo), this year there are believed to be aspirant novelists spread across 90 countries – so it’s really an international event.

They’re also now a business – founder Chris Baty sells novel-writing kits (one of which I’m using to chart my progress), they’re funded by hits and donations, and keep a small team of staff permanently on board throughout the year in the build-up to November. This is one of the first years when events like these, through hashtagging on Twitter, can really take off in a big way and go viral within minutes. On November the first, this was proved right.

I got up, I was nervous, worried and slightly looking forward to it. I’m by no means a slow writer – I can live-blog at 6,000 words an hour. But the idea of a complete novel, with no real plot beyond a one-sentence idea and an ending/twist (I wanted to experiment, shoot me), in one month is pretty daunting. I’ve written novel attempts before, none going past 25,000 words. But this time I wanted to really go for it.

Then NaNoWriMo.org crashed.

It was inevitable really – six digit user numbers, everyone logging on at once – and of course, little old me wondering what I was going to do if I couldn’t access the site. It was all fixed eventually, but it’s how they dealt with it in the mean time that turned them from zeroes into heroes. Immediately, they jumped on to Twitter, giving constant updates about server issues, traffic overloads, and of course, answering questions and keeping people’s spirits up. People started turning to their Twitter account instead of the comatose website, and by the time the site went back up, everyone was happily chugging away at their keyboards.

They’re still going, even now – it’s ten days in, I’m well ahead of schedule, and still enjoying their tweets on a daily basis. They constantly post total word counts – at last count, 197,110 authors who’ve written 914,221,952 words. It may sound a lot, but that’s only an average of around 4,638 words per person, way short of the 15,003 they should be hitting by now. But with things like word sprints, pep talks and interviews, all constantly reinforced via twitter, NaNoWriMo just keeps on giving.

In a way, they’re probably my company of the year. They’re a small team of people who refer to themselves quite often as “writing cheerleaders”, who want nothing more than to see people feel the satisfaction of writing an entire novel in a month – a lifelong dream of many, completed just in time for Christmas. Added rewards include Amazon’s CreateSpace offering winners (those who hit 50,000 words prior to midnight on the 30th November) a free bound copy of their book, and discounts on writing software.

Twitter is a fickle beast. It can go right, à la the wonderful folks at the Office of Letters and Light, or it can go wrong, a la Stephen Fry’s recent hoo-ha and break from Twitter. But if you’re a business with a sudden server crash, get onto your social media accounts and talk to people. That’s all NaNoWriMo did – chatted away, and were casual and upfront about their hardware issues. Result? A lot of involved, interested readers who wrote loads without worrying about the site going down, and at least one social media blogger who hit page 99 and 20,000 words simultaneously last night and is damn proud of it. Now where was that list of literary agents…